This isn't my usual type of post, but I thought it might be something that could come in handy for a lot of people so I've decided to share it with you.
I'm a big big fan of SONOS, I currently have two PLAY:3's and I'm sure that will increase over time. I am also a Premium Spotify user which is great as SONOS and Spotfy work really well together and I'm able to access all my Spotify playlist via the SONOS Controllers. However, there is one area where Spotify lets me down and that is Podcasts. I'm a big Podcast fan, I like to listen to them through-out the day in my home office whilst I am working. Up until now, I've been manually downloading the Podcast MP3's onto a NAS device and linking the file share with SONOS to be able to play them. It's a little too much manual effort for my liking. So I started to look into ways to make my life easier.
iTunes Podcasts
As I mentioned I am big Spotify user and I only have an iTunes account for my iPad. However, iTunes is great when it comes to Podcasts. All of the shows I want to listen to are available on there, so making use of iTunes in my Podcast solution made perfect sense.
I did some digging and found out that I was able to point SONOS to the iTune folder on my Mac which is where all of the Podcasts would be stored. So my first step was to get that setup. Here are the steps you need to follow to get SONOS to see your iTunes music: https://sonos.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1049/~/sonos-and-itunes
Once you have configured SONOS to look at your iTunes Folder you will see the "Imported Playlists" option available within SONOS Controller
So, SONOS was now linked to my iTunes account. First of all I removed all of the default Playlists (Except Podcasts) that iTunes added as they were not needed and made the SONOS menus a little messy. So now in SONOS, I only see Podcasts in the Import Playlist section. Nice and tidy.
To test I subscribed to a single Podcast in iTunes, downloaded the latest episode, "Updated Music Library Now" on the SONOS Controller and there it was ready to play on my SONOS system. Perfect.
So, I've now subscribed to over ten Podcasts that I listen to weekly. I've changed the iTunes settings to check for new episodes every hour and to only keep the last three episodes. This should make sure I don't suddenly fill up my Mac with old Podcasts.
Within the SONOS Controller software there is the options to update my library's content automatically. I've set this to update my Podcasts everyday at 7am so any new episodes are ready and waiting for me when I start my day.
One thing I did notices after the first week was that some Podcasts episodes were not be downloaded automatically. Apparently iTunes will stop updating a podcast if you have not listened to at least one of its episodes in five days. And because I listen to the Podcast through SONOS and not iTunes, iTunes decided to stop downloading the episodes. Nice one Apple.
Fortunately I wasn't only person to have this issue. A guy called Doug had written an AppleScript to fix this problem. There AppleScript can be found here: http://dougscripts.com/itunes/scripts/ss.php?sp=updateexpiredpodcasts Since installing the script, all of my Podcasts update automatically. Thanks Doug!
So now I finally have all of my music in one place allowing my to pump out the tunes on my SONOS system.
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Thanks for this post. The one thing that is lacking with playlists on sonos is that play position isn't preserved with sonos. I would love for sonos to be able to know the current play position in iCloud so that I can stop playing a podcast in the car and pick up the play placement at home.
I switch devices that i listen to podcasts as I move around throughout the day. At home I run them through my Macbook and Airplay to whatever room I happen to be in, and out and about my iPhone is the source and the player. I'd love it if Sonos speakers worked like Airplay speakers - as a selectable audio output device.
Do you have the podcast's actually downloaded onto your iPhone? If so, I believe you can play music/podcasts that are stored on your phone through SonoS. At least you can on Android anyway.
I do, but my phone can only output to a single speaker at a time using Airplay. When I'm at home, I use the Remote application to control iTunes on my Macbook, since it can play to multiple Airplay speakers at the same time, with a separate volume level for each room ( low volume for small rooms, louder volume for large rooms ). Playing directly from the iPhone is ok if I only need it to outbound to a single speaker/headset device.